Our reason has this peculiar fate that, with reference to one class of its knowledge, it is always troubled with questions which cannot be ignored, b… - Immanuel Kant

From such crooked wood as that which man is made of, nothing straight can be fashioned.

A plant, an animal, the regular order of nature — probably also the disposition of the whole universe — give manifest evidence that they are possible only by means of and according to ideas; that, indeed, no one creature, under the individual conditions of its existence, perfectly harmonizes with the idea of the most perfect of its kind — just as little as man with the idea of humanity, which nevertheless he bears in his soul as the archetypal standard of his actions; that, notwithstanding, these ideas are in the highest sense individually, unchangeably, and completely determined, and are the original causes of things; and that the totality of connected objects in the universe is alone fully adequate to that idea.

A league of a special sort must . . . be established, one that we can call a league of peace, which will be distinguished from a treaty of peace because the latter seeks merely to stop one war, while the former seeks to end all wars forever.